And it was one heartbeat too long. An au’it brushed aside the curtain the captain held: the au’it, with her book, stopped, looking steadily at Memnanan, and retreated.

“She’ll tell the Ila I’m here,” Marak said. “She’ll tell the Ila we talked. But the Ila doesn’t care, man. Get to your wife, while you have a wife!”

“Get out,” Memnanan said to him. “Go. Now.”

They had survived the hammerfall. They had not yet survived the storm, and the Ila kept secrets, or the Ila’s staff did. Memnanan was afraid of something here besides the sky that roared destruction against the tent walls.

And suddenly came a sound of a tent wide curtain singing back on its rings.

“Get out!” Memnanan repeated.

Their own parted in the same abrupt way and opened the tent all the way to where the Ila sat. A man stood by her, a man indistinct of origin, aifad wrapped up to the eyes, neither quite tribesman, not quite villager in what he wore.

But Marak stood stock-still, with no attention to the Ila, seated on her chair: his vision was all the man beside her, that figure dislocated from here and the Ila’s presence in memory of his own home, his own hearth. That man, that same figure, identical in the wrap of the aifad and the pitch of the shoulders, the stance of the feet… could not possibly be his father. It could not be, standing by the Ila, before the aui’it, free, and armed.

But the companion reached up a hand and pulled down the aifad; and it was his father’s face. It was Tain, armed, and free, and in the Ila’s close company.

“Father,” Marak said. His thoughts skittered this way and that, helpless between surmise that the Ila was a prisoner and surmise that this improbable conjunction was a vision, like the star-fall, like the ring of fire and the pillar of cloud—or that the Ila had no idea who this man was.

“I said I might take a husband,” the Ila said with a wave of her hand. “Have I offended you, Marak Trin? Do you object?”

He pulled down his own aifad, and tried to find any advantage, even any sanity, on either side of this maneuver.

“You’re both mad,” he said, he said… the madman, in the presence of Tain Trin Tain, the arbiter of sanity.

“He has all your advantages,” the Ila said, “a leader, and desert-wise, and one more. He’s not Luz’s creature.”

“Whatever you say to me,” he reminded the Ila, appalled, thinking even then that the Ila might damn them all, “Luz knows.”